‘The REAL Religion behind National Socialism’

Remember that religions are cultural phenomena first and foremost. They do not depend on a political philosophy or ideology any more than speaking a foreign language or eating specific cuisines does. You can have spiritual beliefs, rituals, scriptures and prophecies all without making any political or economic demands for society. This is why treating politics like a literal religion would be a blockheaded idea.

Regardless of whatever you think of religion or fascism, treating fascism or even antisocialism more generally like religions would be a misdiagnosis with very little explanatory power (in other words, a waste of time), and I suspect that most theologists would probably laugh at the suggestion, for reasons which Richard J. Evans gives in The Third Reich in Power, pages 257–9:

Many observers over the years have seen in [Fascism] a kind of political religion.¹²⁰ […] But one must be careful about pushing the religious metaphor too far.

It would be just as easy to interpret [Fascism] by means of a military image: the promise of turning defeat into total victory, the image of a nation marching in step, annihilating its enemies and merging the doubting individual into the motivated military mass, the hierarchical command structure dominated by the great military leader, and so on; and though religion and militarism have often been connected, in essence they have also frequently been two quite different and mutually hostile forces.¹²⁴

[German Fascism] as an ideology was no religion, not just because Hitler said it was not, nor because it had nothing to say about the hereafter or eternity or the immortal soul, as all genuine religions do, but also, more importantly, because it was too incoherent to be one. Leading [Fascists] did not spend time disputing the finer points of their ideology like medieval scholastics […].

There was no sacred book of [Fascism] from which people took their texts for the day, […] Hitler’s My Struggle, though everyone had to have it on their bookshelf, was too verbose, too rambling, too autobiographical to lend itself to this kind of use. Nor in the end did [German Fascism] promise any kind of final victory to be followed by a Heaven‐like stasis; rather, it was a doctrine of perpetual struggle, of conflict without end.

There was nothing universal about its appeal, as there is with the great world religions, or with major political ideologies such as socialism and Communism: it directed itself only to one small segment of humanity, the Germans, and ruled everyone else ineligible for its benefits.

(Emphasis added, and I cut out the author’s anticommunist crap because the implication that Marx or Engels ‘dreamed up’ their theories rather than basing them on observations of the material world is naïve at best.)

Now, there is indeed a problem with overstating the Third Reich’s relations with Christianity and neopaganism, but TIK—like the many Christian apologists before him, coincidentally—is woefully ill‐equipped for the job. Already in the first five minutes of the video, he quotes (the apparently quite crappy) Eric Voegelin as saying that Adolf Schicklgruber’s ‘millennial prophecy authentically derives from Joachitic speculation’: a bold claim for which TIK failed to show us the evidence.

I am not going to minutely comment on everything in the video. Why? Well, aside from how tedious it would be, it’s mostly because there is very little reason to take it seriously. Try to read this with a straight face: TIK (or specifically somebody whom he read) thinks that he discovered a big, ancient, secret religion that is so common that even some atheists practise it without knowing it. It involves transcending the material world to become one with G‐d, and common practices include ignoring beliefs not your own, and picking what you like from a source while discarding the rest.

For example:

Hitler said in Mein Kampf that he read only to pull out what he thought was relevant to him and would dismiss the rest. Eric Voegelin says that this is straight out the German neo‐Kantian school of historiography: if it doesn’t fit your worldview, it can be dismissed. So, you’re no longer learning from reality, you’re letting your values dictate your perception.

Yes, you read that correctly: not only can an attitude be a religion, but this overwhelmingly common tendency to attempt to separate correct from incorrect information comes from this very religion! Any YouTuber who can trace a normal human behaviour to some ancient mysticism is clearly onto something big here.

It also reminds me of somebody… hmm… whom was it again? Oh yeah, TIK. He has quoted from Richard J. Evans before when it suited him, yet omitted Evans’s comment on the bland assertion that German Fascism was a religion. Does this mean that TIK is a Gnostic‽ Whoah! Hey, look, I found more proof! See:

Just like Das Kapital is badly written, they’re all meant to be as inaccessible as possible for most people because you’re not as ‘knowledgeable’ (gnosis) as the priests of this religion are. If you were, you’d have no trouble reading these texts. They are designed to instill in you the idea that you are stupid. They go around and ’round in circles, repeat the same concepts over and over, make little sense whatsoever, and could have been cut down to about twenty or thirty pages if they were written properly.

…do I even need to make a joke about this? The same overrated crackpot who published a four‐hour video titled ‘Hitler's Socialism | Destroying the Denialist Counter Arguments’? This is a good example of what I meant by TIK lacking circumspection: not only does he share few of the same details that I do about fascism, his self‐awareness is severely wanting. He apparently did not anticipate anybody turning the accusation around; it would be too easy to call him a Gnostic and refer to his antisocialism as further proof of that.

Need another example? How about the fact that he thinks that using a few ‘religious words’ means that somebody is speaking in code? It was pretty obvious to me that a vague expression like ‘May our faith be our supreme protection’ is not an admission that Adolf Schicklgruber invented a religion, but TIK misinterpreted it that way because he needs evidence to support his half‐baked claim that German Fascism was a religion. Funnily enough, TIK demonstrated in his ‘Hitler's Socialism’ video that he was unable to decode the comments saying ‘stick to tanks’ simply as colloquial ways of recommending that he continue with his military videos (which were indeed less obnoxious).

Speaking of which, I’d like to add that his tactic of switching to an ‘evil voice’ when quoting somebody whom he dislikes is grating. It’s as if he’s reading a story book to an audience of children so he switches to comically exaggerated voices depending on the character. The condescending attitude that he assumes only makes his already irksome videos more painful than they needed to be.

In summary, another useless video from TIK. While the German anticommunists might have indeed encouraged some ‘cultish’ behaviors, treating their movement like a religion would be not only inaccurate, it would lead to another dead end since it can’t explain why they selected Jews of all people for antagonization. There is also the extremely uncomfortable implication of placing German Fascism in the same basket of Judaism because they’re both ‘religions’, which he almost did explicitly at one point by mentioning the ‘rivalries’ between Jews and Protestants and whatnot ‘despite belonging to the same group’, which he compared to the rivalries between political movements that he dislikes, but that was as close as he got.